May learn of colours, Nature’s matchless gifts.
There are three pages of this poem, all in the same simple language, from which it is fair to infer that the child’s annual, like its grown-up neighbour, was made to be bought, not read.
OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-GRANDMOTHER
Next to mere idleness, I think knotting is to be reckoned in the scale of insignificance.—Dr. Johnson.
Readers of Dickens (which ought to mean all men and women who have mastered the English alphabet) will remember how that estimable schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, elucidated Dr. Watts’s masterpiece, which had been quoted somewhat rashly by a teacher. “‘The little busy bee,’” said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, “is applicable only to genteel children.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery.”
It also meant, in the good Miss Monflathers’s day, making filigree baskets that would not hold anything, Ionic temples of Bristol-board, shell flowers, and paper landscapes. It meant pricking pictures with pins, taking “impressions” of butterflies’ wings on sheets of gummed paper, and messing with strange, mysterious compounds called diaphanie and potichomanie, by means of which a harmless glass tumbler or a respectable window-pane could be turned into an object of desolation. Indeed, when the genteel young ladies of this period were not reading “Merit opposed to Fascination; exemplified in the story of Eugenio,” or “An Essay on the Refined Felicity which may arise from the Marriage Contract,” they were cultivating what were then called “ornamental arts,” but which later on became known as “accomplishments.” “It is amazing to me,” says that most amiable of sub-heroes, Mr. Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are. They paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this; and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.”
We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snorting at his friend’s remark, to consider the paucity of Mr. Bingley’s list. Tables, screens, and purses represent but the first beginnings of that misdirected energy which for the best part of a century embellished English homes. The truly accomplished young lady in Miss More’s “Cœlebs” paints flowers and shells, draws ruins, gilds and varnishes wood, is an adept in Japan work, and stands ready to begin modelling, etching, and engraving. The great principle of ornamental art was the reproduction of an object—of any object—in an alien material. The less adapted this material was to its purpose, the greater the difficulties it presented to the artist, the more precious became the monstrous masterpiece. To take a plain sheet of paper and draw a design upon it was ignominious in its simplicity; but to construct the same design out of paper spirals, rolling up some five hundred slips with uniform tightness, setting them on end, side by side, and painting or gilding the tops,—that was a feat of which any young lady might be proud. It was so uncommonly hard to do, it ought to have been impossible. Cutting paper with fine sharp scissors and a knife was taught in schools (probably in Miss Monflathers’s school, though Dickens does not mention it) as a fashionable pastime. The “white design”—animals, landscape, or marine—was printed on a black background, which was cut away with great dexterity, the spaces being small and intricate. When all the black paper had been removed, the flimsy tracery was pasted on a piece of coloured paper, thus presenting—after hours of patient labour—much the same appearance that it had in the beginning. It was then glassed, framed, and presented to appreciative parents, as a proof of their daughter’s industry and taste.
The most famous work of art ever made out of paper was probably the celebrated “herbal” of Mrs. Delany,—Mrs. Delany whom Burke pronounced “the model of an accomplished gentlewoman.” She acquired her accomplishments at an age when most people seek to relinquish theirs,—having learned to draw when she was thirty, to paint when she was forty, and to write verse when she was eighty-two. She also “excelled in embroidery and shell-work”; and when Miss Burney made her first visit to St. James’s Place, she found Mrs. Delany’s walls covered with “ornaments of her own execution of striking elegance, in cuttings and variegated stained papers.” The herbal, however, was the crowning achievement of her life. It contained nearly a thousand plants, made of thin strips of coloured paper, pasted layer over layer with the utmost nicety upon a black background, and producing an effect “richer than painting.”